Gwendy’s Final Task

Norris plodded into the house, head down, and closed the door behind him. Sitting down on the arm of the sofa, he placed a hand on Gwendy’s shoulder. As he explained what had happened—a hit-and-run, her husband of so many years taken in mere instants—Gwendy scooted to the far side of the couch and curled into a fetal position, hugging her legs tight to her chest.

“He wouldn’t have suffered,” Norris said, and then added the very thing she had been thinking: “I know that’s no consolation.”

“Where?” Thinking it must have been in the Rock ’N Bowl’s parking lot, probably some guy in a pickup truck pulling out too fast after too many beers, maybe reaching down to tune the radio.

“Derry.”

“Where?” Thinking she must have misheard. Derry was over a hundred miles north of the Rock ’N Bowl and Billy Franklin’s Rumford apartment.

Norris, perhaps thinking she wanted the actual location, consulted his notebook. “He was crossing Witcham Street. Near the bottom of what they call Up-Mile Hill.”

“Witcham Street in Derry? Are you sure?”

“Sorry to say, dear, but I am.”

“What was he doing there?” Still not able to believe this news. It was like a stone lodged in her throat. No, lower: on her heart.

Norris Ridgewick gave her an odd look. “You don’t know?”

Gwendy shook her head.

In the days following her husband’s funeral, Gwendy found herself searching for an answer to that question with a dogged persistence that bordered on obsession. She discovered from talking to several members of Ryan’s bowling team that he had called them early on Black Friday and canceled on the annual tournament, as well as Billy Franklin’s after-party. He gave no reason, just claimed that something important had come up.

None of it made any sense to Gwendy. It surely wasn’t work-related—Ryan was supposed to be taking it easy until after the New Year, a fact she confirmed in a phone call with his editor—much less an assignment that would’ve required him to make the two-hour drive to Derry on the day after Thanksgiving.

What she knew about Derry wasn’t good. It was a dark and dreary town with a violent history. There were an unsettling number of child murders and disappearances lurking in its past, as well as detailed documentation of strange sightings and weird goings-on. Toss in a series of deadly floods and the fact that Derry was home to one of the most blatantly anti-LGBT communities in the state, and you had yourself a place that most non-locals avoided like poison sumac.

A woman Gwendy had become close with during a long ago fund-raising campaign claimed that back when she was a teenager living in Derry, she’d once been chased down a dark street by a giggling man dressed as a circus clown. The man had had razors for teeth and huge round silver eyes … or so she said. She was only able to get away from him by running into the Derry Police Station screaming her terrified head off. While the officer in charge fetched a glass of water and tried his best to calm her, two other policemen went outside to search for the man. They returned fifteen minutes later—faces flushed, eyes wide, breathing heavy—claiming that they hadn’t seen a thing. The streets were deserted. But they had sounded scared, the woman told Gwendy. And they had looked it, too. She was certain they weren’t telling the truth. The officer in charge drove the girl home later that night in his squad car and watched her from the driveway until she was safely inside.

And there was this: when Gwendy was growing up, her father claimed on more than one occasion—usually after reading something troubling in the newspaper or drinking too many cans of Black Label beer—that Derry was haunted. When he was in his early twenties, years before he married Gwendy’s mom, he’d once lived for six months in a cramped studio apartment overlooking the canal that split the town in two. He spent his days peddling cheap insurance policies door to door. He’d despised his time in Derry, and fled the town as soon as the opportunity presented itself. Although usually practical to his bones, Alan Peterson told his daughter he believed that some places were built on bad ground, thereby ensuring they would forever remain cursed. He insisted that Derry was one of those places.

Many longtime residents of Maine wore their well-earned reputation for coming across as surly and mistrusting to outsiders—if not downright hostile at times—as a sort of badge of honor. Gwendy knew this and accepted it, even going so far in years past as to poke fun at the stereotype in several of her novels, as well as a handful of political speeches. “I told that flat-landah to git his ass on back down the rud to N’Yawk” was always good for a warm-up laugh before getting down to business.